I recall a company in the taps and fittings sector, close to 65% of its revenue coming from abroad, present in more than thirty countries. Every year, some of those countries dropped off the list and new ones appeared. Nobody inside the company could really explain why. It wasn’t a strategy. It was a pattern of reaction, repeated so many times that it had started to look like one.

That case has stayed with me because it captures something most exporters eventually run into: a footprint built market by market, opportunity by opportunity, without anyone ever stepping back to ask what the overall shape should be.

For a long time, that approach was good enough. It isn’t anymore.

Geopolitics has entered the factory

Italy became the world’s fourth largest exporter this year, overtaking Japan. Whether or not that position proves lasting, it says something about the resilience of Italian companies in an increasingly turbulent environment. Total exports reached €643 billion in 2025, up 3.3% on the previous year, even as forecasts for the current year turn more cautious.

A recent survey of over a thousand internationalised companies in Lombardy, carried out by Confindustria Lombardia with SACE and ISPI, found that two-thirds of manufacturers now rank the geopolitical picture as the single most important factor in their strategic decisions: ahead of technology, ahead of raw material access.

More than seven in ten companies say they have revised their strategy as a direct result: reassessing local partners more carefully, revising budgets more often, and in many cases actively relocating production toward countries considered politically aligned, what has become known as friend-shoring.

Six in ten went further and restructured internally, most commonly by centralising how they manage international expansion and sourcing. The most direct impact fell on competence: senior managerial and technical skills needed for this kind of work, missing in 44% of cases.

It’s often at that point that we see companies turn to interim management — Italian managers steering the strategy centrally, foreign managers executing it on the ground. This isn’t just an option for large corporates: through the IMW network, we’ve placed local interim managers with SME clients in the US, France, Poland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Germany, among more than 30 countries where the network operates.

Two competences, rarely found in the same place

That gap is the part I want to focus on, because it’s the part that gets missed in conversations dominated by macro numbers.

Internationalisation needs strategic-level competence: someone able to define where the company should be, and why, and to direct the people executing that plan on the ground. But it also needs operational competence, ideally local, able to actually implement it.

Very few organisations have both, permanently, in-house. This is precisely the kind of gap an interim management assignment is built to close: intense while the expansion is happening, unnecessary once the new footprint is built and running on its own logic.

This is also where that case makes more sense in hindsight. What the company lacked wasn’t ambition or market access. It lacked someone accountable for the overall design of its international footprint.

From reacting to markets, to directing them

The direction of travel in the data supports this. Companies today are, on average, present in fewer countries than two years ago (21 versus 23) and less dependent on their single largest market. That’s not a retreat. It’s discipline: a conscious narrowing of scope in favour of markets that genuinely justify the investment.

Don’t let your footprint be the sum of past improvisations. Decide, deliberately, where you need to be and why, and who takes you there. Often, as I’ve seen many times, that’s an interim assignment: central strategic direction, local operational execution, built to end the moment the new footprint can run on its own.